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Jury Duty

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Re: Jury Duty

#81

Post by mystikal »

onewaystreet wrote: post #61
kiba wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really trust jury/layman to make the correct decision. I mean, you're taking ordinary people, untrained to probe the gobbyspeak of lawyers or matters of science And you're expecting them to render guilty or innocent verdicts?

If you're guilty you want a jury trial. If you're innocent you want a bench trial.

You're saying a jury will reach the wrong verdict more than 50% of the time, and a bench will reach the right verdict more than 50% of the time? I don't disagree, but are there statistics?

Re: Jury Duty

#82

Post by nraynaud »

fengwick3 wrote: post #20

Despite the other negative comments, I actually find this a vicarious account of the judicial system - a poignant reminder that behind any democratic system lies humans.

In a lot of the world, justice decisions are made by professional judges who have a lot of literature (laws, other decisions, and interpretation by higher courts) to guide their decisions. Which has the upside of more informed decisions (in France, it's interesting to see that professional judges seem more harsh than public jury tho.)

Re: Jury Duty

#83

Post by tempestn »

aorloff wrote: post #15
powera wrote: post #11

This guy seems like a terrible, terrible juror. Bragging about violating the rules, annoyed because the judge is called "your honor", implying that a jury with 6/12 people white is somehow a sign of massive racial bias? What is supposed to be redeeming about this article? I'm not reading it all unless there's something somebody says is worth reading. EDIT: It gets more readable in the jury section, but I still don't…

No, this guy seems like a real human being. Jurors are supposed to be humans, first and foremost. That's why juries are made up of your peers and not a bunch of legal professionals. There's lots of "rules" in life, and our job as humans is figuring out which ones matter.

I largely agree, although couldn't the same argument be used by those who would enter a guilty verdict in the presence of reasonable doubt? It seems many people believe it's just to convict a person they believe to be guilty, even if it's conceivable that they aren't, and that "innocent until proven guilty" is just a meaningless rule.

Re: Jury Duty

#84

Post by curun1r »

geomark wrote: post #5
rayiner wrote: post #2

> In the end, only two men of color make it to the jury, and I am one of them. The other is Latino. There are two Latina women, one African-American woman, and one Asian woman. The remaining six jurors are white. Thats basically the racial composition of the U.S. Indeed, people of color are over-represented in that jury.

So the jury was 6/12=50% white, 3/12=25% Latino, 2/12=17% Black and 1/12=8% Asian. The US racial demographics are White: 64%, Hispanic: 16%, Black: 12%, Asian: 5% [1] Looks like Blacks and Latinos were overrepresented on that jury. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

On the other hand, we're supposed to be judged by a jury of our peers so, demographics aside, it's disturbing how often a person of color is convicted by a primarily white jury. We're seeing nationwide testimony, by how certain isolated events are receiving reactions that indicate that they aren't isolated, that police misconduct towards minorities is far more common that we white people would like to believe. And yet this story shows just how easy it would be for the minority jury members (both in terms of race and dissenting opinion) to cave in and allow someone to be convicted based almost entirely on the presupposition that the police did nothing wrong.

Re: Jury Duty

#85

Post by surrealize »

coldtea wrote: post #76
jacobolus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly note: I think you want some word other than “vicarious”, which doesn’t make sense in context, the way the sentence is constructed. (I’m not precisely sure what you were trying to say, so I won’t suggest alternate words.)

Why would you say "vicarious" doesn't make sense in that context? It IS a second-hand account. vicarious: "experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person" - synonyms: indirect, second-hand

Pretty sure this is a first-hand account. The author experienced the judicial system directly, as a juror. Then he wrote this first-hand account. If you told someone else about it, that would be second-hand.

Re: Jury Duty

#86

Post by aaronbrethorst »

cgm616 wrote: post #55

It's interesting to look at if this article is fiction or non-fiction. It is certainly amazing writing with a strong message, but seems to be so strange to be non-fiction. Then again, I knew about some of this from the excellent Illustrated Guide to Criminal Justice, so I wasn't totally surprised. In the end, does it even matter if it happened?

    In the end, does it even matter if it happened?
Yes, a man could have been sent to prison for a murder where reasonable doubt exists about whether or not he did it.

Re: Jury Duty

#87

Post by remarkEon »

powertower wrote: post #67
sethammons wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An underlying health condition would not mean anything. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull

I don't understand what you are refuting? We both know that the narrative was that a white cop choked a black man to death - which was simply not true.

sethammons is saying (I believe) that the defense of "the choke hold didn't literally kill the man" is not a defense in a criminal case. The action, though not the direct cause of death, directly contributed to triggering the underlying condition that precipitated the victim's death.

-> Any person that has experienced a chokehold, knows that if you can't breath, you can't move air, you can't say anything, not even "I can't breathe" 1 time.

This is also a little misleading. In a past life, I had to certify in combatives training and you most definitely can pass out from a choke hold (the kind applied in this case) and should the applier of the choke hold not release they can, exogenous of intentions, kill the person. As mentioned, all that doesn't matter though.

Re: Jury Duty

#88

Post by thedudemabry »

desdiv wrote: post #74
geomark wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that had worked for me. I served 3 times, first time was a hung jury, next two were burglary and battery. Terrible experiences all of them. Wish I could have been excused.

Just curious, were you asked about your hung jury experience during the voir dire?

I really enjoyed this article, but it made me realize that I don't have a good understanding the goals of the voir dire process. It reminded me of job interviews, where certain questions are off-limits in order to hopefully limit the effects of some of the personal biases of the interviewer.

From a game design point of view, it's fascinating. The selection process attempts to give both opponents an equal chance of eliminating undesired pieces from the board. But from the system's point of view, balancing that power against the delivery of justice as innocent-until-proven-guilty/burden-of-proof/reasonable-doubt seems kinda suspect.

I'm totally going down the rabbithole reading about this over the weekend :)

Re: Jury Duty

#89

Post by coldtea »

surrealize wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you say "vicarious" doesn't make sense in that context? It IS a second-hand account. vicarious: "experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person" - synonyms: indirect, second-hand

Pretty sure this is a first-hand account. The author experienced the judicial system directly, as a juror. Then he wrote this first-hand account. If you told someone else about it, that would be second-hand.

Isn't it second-hand for the parent though, which I think is what he means?

Re: Jury Duty

#90

Post by throw_this_away »

YorkianTones wrote: post #29

"Edith looks up from a game of solitaire and casually mentions that she actually thinks the murder was committed by the accomplice, who was never found and is not on trial. But since the defendant’s lawyer did such a poor job exonerating him, she concludes, she’s going to deliver a guilty verdict. My jaw drops. No one questions her obviously flawed reasoning, because she’s on their side." This, for me, was the most t…

Reading that quote was incredibly disheartening; That people could be so cavalier about sending a person to jail (possibly forever) even when there's obviously reasonable doubt. I've never served on a jury, but it seems like the state should put more effort into teaching jurors that "beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't just an abstract idea...
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